So to be honest, I didn’t really fully understand all the articles that we had to read. I did however, find a lot of similarities between the articles, and there was stuff that I definitely did understand. For instance, in the “What is Web 2.0″ I really liked the list at the beginning that outlined the main features of what exactly web 2.0 is. It made me realize, I don’t even really know what web 1.0 is.

I’ve grown up almost completely with what is considered web 2.0. I recognize features such as blogging, tagging, wikipedia, and google ad sense. What kept going through my mind as I read the articles was why I knew about each of the features…one thing kept coming to mind, facebook, a site I know far too well. Each of the article we had to read kept mentioning tagging, creating your own webpage with all your favorite sites and information on it, just like when we had to subscribe to all the blogs from ds106.

The way I got through each of these articles and made the connections was by relating it to facebook, that one similarity that I kept seeing. Here’s how I made sense of the material we had to read:

My facebook homepage (as well as everyone else’s) is made up of the friends that I have found on facebook, events that I am “attending,” pictures that people have tagged, musicians and sports teams that I have “become a fan of,” etc. The most recent of all these things comes up on my newsfeed, just like in google reader for ds106. My newsfeed is personalized just for me; it consists of all the things that I am interested in, people I know, things that I want to stay updated with, pictures of my friends so I know what they are up to even while I may be states away from them. Ads that come up on the side of my facebook are from google ad sense so even the ads that come up are personalized to me. So just as the web 2.0 articles were talking about creating blogs, wikis, etc. to suit your interests, I have my facebook. It’s the people and things that I care about currently all in one place.

I don’t really know if all the web 2.0 material was supposed to relate together like that, or even if I made sense of it correctly, but when I found that by relating it to facebook, a website all college students are very familiar with, it was easier to make sense of the web 2.0 articles.